Epilogue
SIX MONTHS LATER
The church at Haslington had not seen this many people since Christmas, and the vicar, surveying his pews from the vestry doorway with an expression of quiet satisfaction, appeared to feel that this reflected well on everyone involved.
Mary had asked for a small wedding. She had been very clear about this on multiple occasions and with considerable firmness.
She was forty-nine years old, she had been married before, she knew her own mind, and what her mind wanted was something simple and unpretentious with the people she loved and no fuss whatsoever.
She got the people she loved. The fuss had rather got away from her.
This was largely because the Langley sisters had been involved in the planning, and the Langley sisters collectively had a different understanding of the word small than Mary did.
The church was full. The flowers were abundant.
The Langley ladies and their husbands were seated in the first few rows on the bride’s side while the grooms side was occupied by Sir Franklin’s relations from far and wide.
It was the first time Evelyn, Charlotte, Marianne, Frances and their husbands had been at Blackthorne together.
They had visited each other’s country seats through the summer and overlapped in London through the season, but a proper house party — rooms prepared, trunks unpacked, children running through the corridors at hours that tested the patience of the staff — was something new.
The house felt different for it. It felt the way Helena had always thought it could feel, from that first afternoon when she and Gideon had walked through its rooms together and condemned the decore.
Sir Franklin stood at the altar with his hands clasped and his expression that of a man trying very hard to maintain composure and not entirely succeeding.
Mary walked toward him with a bright smile and Helena’s heart soared as she watched her friend.
The vows were exchanged. The vicar, who had by now developed a comfortable familiarity with the complicated domestic arrangements of the Blackthorne household and its extended circle, conducted the proceedings with evident pleasure.
When it was done Mary kissed her husband first, before he had quite collected himself to kiss her, which produced a sound of warm approval from the pews and caused Sir Franklin to laugh through his remaining tears in a way that endeared him thoroughly to everyone present.
Outside in the sunshine the children were released from their enforced good behavior and took full advantage. There were a considerable number of them, Lavinia toddling among her new friends with glee.
The wedding breakfast was on the south lawn at Blackthorne, tables set out in the afternoon light with Mrs. Baker’s pies arranged on a long table near the house. There was no wedding cake. Mary had been equally clear on this subject as she had been on the matter of fuss.
The sign at the center of the pie table read, in Helena’s handwriting: The Duke and Duchess’s Choice — Rhubarb Apple.
The Langley contingent claimed a table early and held it. Helena sat between Frances and Charlotte with Evelyn and Marianne across from her.
“I maintain,” Evelyn said, after a while, “that my path to matrimony was the most remarkable of all of ours.”
“There is no argument to be had,” Charlotte said. “You were married to an eighty-year-old man and then to his heir. Nothing any of the rest of us did comes close.”
“I think Helena is second,” Marianne said. “A matchmaker who became the match. That is genuinely extraordinary.”
“It was not quite like that,” Helena said.
“It was exactly like that,” Frances said.
“Second place for most extraordinary tale must be Helena’s,” Evelyn confirmed.
“We cannot rank the rest of us,” Charlotte said. “Third, fourth and fifth are too evenly contested. We should all share third and leave it there.”
“I think we can place Clara 4th. She will not mind. Her love story is rather boring, and I know she won’t mind my saying so,” Marianne said with a laugh.
“That is true,” Helena replied. Clara and Benjamin had wed the previous month and hadn’t returned yet from their journey to the continent.
“We should make the husbands rank themselves,” Evelyn said. “They will enjoy it enormously and reach no conclusion whatsoever and it will occupy them for at least an hour.”
They all looked across the lawn to where the five husbands in question were engaged in a game involving a wooden ball and a set of rules that had clearly been invented on the spot and were already generating considerable disagreement.
“What is Gideon doing?” Frances said.
Helena looked. Gideon appeared to be arguing a point of some technicality with Rhys, using his hands to demonstrate something that Rhys was declining to accept.
James had appointed himself referee and was making things considerably worse.
Nathaniel and Lucien had formed an alliance of convenience against whatever position Gideon was advancing.
“I have no idea,” Helena said. “I have learned not to ask.”
They watched for a moment. The argument resolved itself into laughter, which was how most of their arguments resolved, and the game resumed.
After a little while Gideon detached himself from it and came across the lawn. He had grass on his boots and a smile on his face. He stopped at their table and bowed.
“I would like to steal my wife, if it is permissible,” he said.
“You may not,” Evelyn said. “We are using her.”
“Briefly. I will bring her back.”
“Post haste,” Evelyn said. “We are in the middle of something important.”
“What are you in the middle of?”
“Ranking our routes to matrimony by order of peculiarity,” Marianne said.
“And how did I do?”
“Helena is second,” Charlotte said. “You are implicated in second place by association.”
Gideon looked at Helena. “Second,” he said.
“Evelyn is first,” she said. “Octogenarian first husbands and apricot induced tragedies are difficulty to defeat.”
“Ah.” He nodded with the respect due to a superior claim. “Fair enough.” He held out his hand to Helena. “Briefly,” he said again to the table.
Helena took his hand and stood.
“Post haste,” Charlotte reminded him, as they walked away.
They went around the side of the house where it was quieter, following the path along the kitchen garden toward the old stone wall at the eastern end of the grounds. Gideon walked beside her and matched her pace without comment, which she had long since stopped needing to ask him to do.
“Are you quite all right?” he said.
“You have asked me that twice already today.”
“It is a large gathering and you have been on your feet since before the ceremony.”
“I am several months pregnant, not an invalid.” She looked at him sideways. “I am perfectly well. Stop asking and I will tell you if that changes.”
He accepted this without further argument, which was one of the ways he had changed in six months that she found most useful.
The stone wall came into view, and beyond its Ruby’s pen, relocated the previous summer closer to the kitchen garden at Helena’s request and closer to the house than Mrs. Storm entirely approved of.
Ruby herself was immediately visible — considerably larger than she had been as a piglet, pink and solid in the afternoon sun, apparently asleep.
She opened one eye at the sound of their footsteps.
“Hello,” Helena said.
Ruby made her sound of identification and regarded them with curiosity. No doubt expecting a treat of some sort.
Helena leaned on the wall and looked at her. Gideon stood beside her, his arm against hers on the top of the stone.
The sounds of the celebration carried from the south lawn — children’s voices, music from somewhere near the house, the periodic eruption of the men’s game into argument and then laughter.
“I had another letter from Emmett,” Gideon said. “He is offering more money for the land.”
“No.” She did not need to think about it.
“Not now, not ever, as far as I am concerned. If Lavinia one day decides she wishes to return it to him, when she is old enough to make that decision for herself, then that is entirely her choice. Until then the answer is no, and at this point it is no on principle regardless of anything else he might offer.”
“I told him much the same.”
“Good.” She looked at Ruby, who had closed her eye again. “He will write again.”
“Almost certainly.”
She shook her head slowly. She took in the huge estate she now called home and sighed. “I keep thinking,” she said, “about what any of this would have looked like to me years ago. Sitting in Bloomsbury wondering if I could pay the week’s bills.” She paused. “I would not have believed it.”
“No,” Gideon said. “Neither would I, if I am honest. I meant I would not have believed that it would turn out like this. Any of it.”
She looked up at him. He had that expression — the quiet one, the one she had come to understand was the truest version of him.
“You were always going to find a way, I am sure of that. For you, my dear, are formidable,” he said. “I believe I once told you that needed toning down.”
“You did. You said it was going to put certain gentlemen off.”
“I was wrong. Entirely wrong.” He held her gaze. “I am very fortunate to be the sort of gentleman who is not put off by it in the slightest.”
She turned toward him properly. “I love you. I want you to know that I am aware of how long it took me to say it properly and mean it without reservation, and I am sorry for that. I love you.”
He put his arms around her, pulling her near.
“I love you,” he said. “Even if I will never concede in when it comes to the pie battle.”
She laughed against his shoulder. Behind them Ruby made a small contented sound and shifted in her hay.
From the direction of the south lawn came Lavinia’s voice. “Gidon!” The latest version of his name.
Gideon looked in that direction. “We should go back.”
“We should,” Helena agreed. “They will be wondering where we are.”
“And your friends specifically said post haste.”
“They did.” Helena straightened and took his arm.
They walked back along the path together, and the sounds of the party grew louder as they rounded the corner of the house.
They came back out into the afternoon sunshine, back to the tables and the children and the music and all the people who had, without any of them quite planning it, become their family.
The End?